Joe’s Leadership Blog

I recently bought Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter).  After reading it, reading a post on the author’s website and seeing our staff combine with a program partner on a great presentation, I needed to talk about presenting again.

The blog Presentation Zen showcases a great presenter in Bill Strickland who talks about the career centers which he started in Pittsburgh, PA.  Anyone who works with marginalized youth will appreciate the presentation.  I strongly agree with him that poor kids deserve better than “it’s good enough for those kids.”  He makes a point of putting fountains in his centers and created a curriculum teaching the flower business in order to give those kids beauty in their learning environment.  Strickland isn’t afraid to think big and ask powerful people for help.  In terms of the presentation itself, he follows two key tenets of great presentations that are gaining steam around the web.   

1. He tells a compelling story.  You are engaged throughout the presentation due to his storytelling and humor. 
2. There isn’t a single slide that has a bullet point or statistic on it throughout the 35 minute presentation.  Yet these slides have helped him engage donors who have given millions of dollars to his centers.

Our organization just completed a major presentation in conjunction with the Gang Unit.  The presenters had great passion and information to share and took the time to prepare.  Thanks to the Presentation Zen and others I have posted about in the past here, we were able to take the presentation to another level.  These were some of the lessons learned:

1. Start with the end in mind-The first question was, “What do we want the audience to come away with?”  We continually came back to this to strip away extraneous details.  If you don’t have an answer to this question, then, as Nicholas Bates says here, you should reconsider having the presentation.
2. We decided to wrap the facts around a story.  As noted in Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and elsewhere,  people remember stories better than words.  Our staff took this and ran with it to come up with a great story and our partner in the police department helped to take it to another level by referring back to the story with the meaningful statistics that gave weight to the story.
3. We laid out the presentation on paper first.  The technical side is just the tool.  Doing it on paper first allowed us to focus on the message.  Plus, having 3-5 people wrapped around a computer screen isn’t productive. 
4. We replaced the majority of bullets with pictures to help imprint the story in their memory.  One attendee asked me to e-mail him a copy of one of the pictures after the event to remind him of what we were trying to accomplish. 
5. We ended with a call to action.  Great presentations are relatively meaningless if they don’t ask the audience to make a difference afterwards. 
6. Taking the time to review the presentation repeatedly

Added to the passion, knowledge and teamwork of the presenters (Ed and Miguel, you were great), these details helped to polish the presentation to the point that the Superintendent asked them to repeat the presentation for all of his principals and the head of Juvenile Probation to ask for it to be delivered to all of the Probation officers. 

If you are a trainer, need to make presentations to donors or community partners, I highly recommend Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter).

 Update: The blogosphere has  a lot on presenting these days.  Here’s another one from Cultivate Greatness on how to present like one of the best: Steve Jobs.  One of her points is Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff in reference to technical glitches.  This happened in our recent presentation.  An alarm clock was supposed to go off to start the story.  It didn’t for whatever reason.  The presenters paused for a moment and then dived right in.  No one in the audience aside from me knew that anything was missing.

Categories: Leadership, Reviews, Technology
Tags: features, marketing, powerpoint, presentation, zen